Enlightenment Through Understanding

Hooey and Phooey from John C. Wright

And a response by Vox Day Safe as houses in which he defends Wright’s competence as an author despite their political differences.

The problem is Mr. Wright puts himself on a moral high ground of infallibility…by not taking stance, he can avoid being wrong, but at the same time from his perch accuse others else of being ‘too extreme’ or ‘taking him out of context’, with an air of pretentiousness on his part.

Going through his post…

From the axiom that different population groups have different heritable traits, it does not follow that the traits are genetic rather than cultural, are natural rather than produced deliberately by enemies of the union, or that the differences are of such a magnitude that they cause inevitable conflicts, or that such conflicts are or are not to be tolerated for the sake of the greater good that comes from the blessings of liberty.

Seems like he’s really entrenched in this Pollyanna concept of ‘liberty’, and even the cynical left understands that liberty is a construct and hence revocable, not an unalienable ‘natural right’. Second, your personal liberty does not include the right to impose externalities on others, and for society to not respond, including but not limited to, sequestration of said individuals from society. Although Wright invokes a utilitarian/consequentialist argument (‘greater good’), this can be reversed by arguing that a ‘greater good’ is achieved by having less tolerance, not more.

In the example of two groups who grow wrathful at different rates, for example, putting more police in the more violent neighborhood might be a more cost effective solution than isolating the evil gene responsible for their evil and exiling those who possess it.

…and that’s why he have a possible entitlement spending problem, because policy makers keep throwing money at these social problem, with the same ineffective programs and piss-poor results, instead of, figuratively speaking, nipping it in the bud.

It doesn’t have to be exile – eugenics, including offering financial incentives for certain individuals to not reproduce, could be a viable long-term solution that does not impugn on individual rights (in fact, many people would probably choose moeny to forgo reproduction). At the same time, offer incentives for the intelligent to spread their genes.

I have heard partisans of the Alt-Right make outrageous statements such as, for example, Spaniards and Jews and Irish and Germans are not now and never can become American: that no one not of Anglo-Saxon blood can ever become American. This, even for Spaniards and Jews who have served in the military, bled in the wars, and made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the liberties we Americans enjoy.

But Wright provides no links to support this supposition. Rather, the alt-right believes culture and government is downstream from ethnicity. Shared ethnicity leads to shared values.

Even granting that there are genetic and noncultural characteristics creating a different threshold of anger between, say, hot-blooded Spaniards and aloof Germans, it would not follow from this that no community of mixed races is possible or desirable, and that a community based on shared values, such as an agreement to respect the civic rights of other in return for being respected, cannot exist and should not be tried.

Hot-blooded Spaniards and aloof Germans are tolerable but not Islamists, who have a proclivity to terrorism, and, of course, the rape. Part of the rise of the alt-right is in response to the ‘rapefugee’ crisis in Europe right now, as well as concerns over immigration in America. The alt-right understands that Trump is the only major American politician addressing these issues.

More than one partisan of the Alt-Right mentions a naturalization law from the Eighteenth Century excluding non-White immigrants, and uses this a lonely proof that the Founding Fathers intended America to be, not a Christian nation supporting the Rights of Man, as they repeatedly said, but intended America to be a White nation supporting the Rights of Whites, something they never said.

It may have been implied…

Unfortunately, the wording of the law does not extend beyond the express purpose of the law. Since the only non-Europeans in North America at that time were Red Indians and Black slaves, with free Blacks as rare as Jews or Turks, the word “White” at that time referred to the same group as the words “Civilized Christians”. A newborn nation in the midst of the first steps of its experiment with a disestablishment form of government would prefer not to use the word ‘Christian’ in its laws.

It may have also been implied

But even supposing the argument to hold, in what sense is this early law to be accorded more respect than the laws which superseded it? Supposing that preserving America for Anglo-Saxons alone was the intent of the Act, why should we accord it more honor than we do the Dred Scott decision or the Alien and Sedition Acts? Why not regard this law as an aberration alien to the general character of the American spirit?

It doesn’t mean the ‘American spirit’ cannot be fixed, in order to to exclude those who are a threat or undesirable to society and or a drain on public resources. Early American history had zero-tolerance, and only through revisionism has such tolerance has been appended to the ‘American spirit’, which has been bastardized to such an extent to be unrecognizable from its antecedent.

Even granting this argument (which I do not) that the Constitutional order before the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was the only true America, and the post-Lincoln America is a false and corrupt Whore of Babylon, what grounds are there for preferring Antebellum America to Postbellum America?

It doesn’t matter where you draw the demarcation (Antebellum vs. Postbellum). Wright is trying to frame it as a civil rights issue, with the implication being those who disagree are ‘racist’; rather, it’s an issue of how society deals with its undesirable elements.

The historical fact is that America is not now and never has been a racial nation like the Irish or Japanese. It America is a union of what were once sovereign states of different cultures, denominations, and characters: fortunately, all the denominations were Christian, and the shared language and law was English. This allowed for sufficient organic unity (such as we conservatives says is the core of a country) for the union to be formed.

Some groups assimilate better then others. Germans and Irish assimilate well. So do Japanese and Chinese. Muslims assimilate the worst. The alt-right’s primary concern is immigration, particularly by poorly assimilating groups.

Racism, however disguised, is alien to that organic core which makes America what it is. It is alien, in fact, to European law and custom following the edicts of Justinian outlawing slavery, since it is alien to Christendom. It is, however, endemic to the human species: and the Alt-Right wishes to argue that this is a universal human characteristic that should be incorporated into our laws. They also argue that the idea of natural rights, rights innate to all men, individual rights, and all men being made in the image and likeness of God are recently coined, alien to Christianity, and alien to the legal traditions of Europe. Time does not permit a point by point refutation of this wingnuttery: I will say only that the crackpot arguing in favor of geocentrism has a more coherent argument with more evidence on his side.

Like in response to ‘Gnossoss’, dismissive labels such as ‘wingnuttery’ are not an argument either.

The idea that Americanism is granted by birth rather than by dedication to the proposition for which America stands is now and always has been unamerican.

Do we want a nation of productive people who contribute to society, or a nation of those who are a drain.

That is, in fact, the one thing that makes American different from other countries: the fact that you can become one of us by dedicating yourself to our ideals and asking to join. As GK Chesterton famously never said, America is the only nation with the soul of a Church.

But the problem is these ‘ideals’ keep moving to the left.

Even if the Alt-Right wanted to make the humbler argument that Americans in the past were a nation formed by shared ideals rather than shared bloodline, but should halt the practice in the near future, and should hereafter all themselves to be a race like the Irish, the fact of it is that in order to be an American, you have to agree with the American ideas, the foremost of which is that America is an idea, not a bloodline.

But it was largely implied from the beginning that America would be WASP nation. It didn’t have to be codified but it was implied to be so, and then gradually the conditions were relaxed to include Catholics and then, not soon after, pretty much anyone. But HBD 101: Irish are not a race; rather, they are an ethnicity of the ‘white race’. ‘Whiteness’, which is biological instead of territorial, encompass much of Europe, and these biological similarities could explain why the assimilation of Irish and Germans in America was successful…

But in the 1950s, before the welfare state, the marriage rate and divorce rate among blacks in America were better than among whites. It was not until the federal government began bribing the blacks to have bastards, and giving them money in return for votes, that the rates among black poor turned toxic.

This is debunked here. Although Wright is correct about politicians bribing voters, eliminating such disincentives won’t magically make everything better. That’s the problem with the ‘mainstream right’, and how like the ‘left’, they ignore the role of biology. The left says ‘we need more govt.’ the right says ‘we need less’ but both these ignore biological realities.

Now, since England has a similar urban poor problem caused by similar Leftist policies, the argument that the racial and genetic inferiority of the blacks in America causes them to be suckered by the Leftists into living like savage evaporates. Whites living under similar welfare state circumstances act similarly.

Yes, there are many poor whites, but the poverty and crime rate among blacks is still higher than for whites, for all age groups, as well as an achievement gap that persists despite billions of taxpayer dollars, civil rights and full integration, and decades of government programs.

The Alt-Right makes much ado about the IQ differences between blacks and whites. Hooey and phooey.

It is hooey in that it is junk science: the differences between where the peak of the racial bellcurve falls are less than is found between twin brothers. Since IQ tests differ by ten and twenty points depending on whether the man taking the test was read bedtime stories as a child, it is hardly what one expects for a genetic difference.

Wright may be confusing cause and effect. It’s not that reading to children boosts IQ scores, rather it’s that smarter parents, who pass their genes for high IQ to their children, are more inclined to read to their children. Differences in intelligence manifest so early in life that they cannot be attributed to environment.

It is phooey in that having a high IQ is not a necessity for being an honest, productive, chaste and decent member of a democratic republic. Indeed, very few high IQ people avoid the trap of intellectual pride which renders them unfit for society: nearly all college professors are high IQ types, and they are enemies of everything in Western Society. The devil was the brightest of the archangels.

Speaking as a genius myself (or, at least, so I am rated by my IQ test — one main reason why I regard them as hooey) I can tell you the genius is overrated. Honesty is a better trait to have for civic stability. Far, far too many people with high IQ regard themselves as being allowed to lie and deceive the unintelligent, whom they regard as inferiors, or as subhumans, and all the main antichristian and antiwestern attacks these days come from the fever swamps of the intellectuals.

For some reason, the very utterance of IQ triggers a switch in many people’s brains that flicks off reality. No one denies that some people are taller or fatter than others. No one denies Shaq is very tall or that Usain Bolt is very fast, so what is so hard about accepting that some people are more intelligent than others, too. Yet everyone has to dance around the issue of IQ. It’s not racist that some groups score lower in IQ tests than others – it’s just reality. The left keeps chanting that ‘IQ is not everything’, but no on ever said it was, but it’s pretty important, and if it weren’t important the left wouldn’t have to make such a big deal to try to prove otherwise.

Wright also falls into the leftist trap of treating high-IQ as a handicap, that superior intellect must come at the cost of another trait, such as honesty. The data suggests that smarter people are more ethical and moral.

The Alt-Right uses all the same rhetorical tactics as the Alt-Left (otherwise known as SJWs) to promote the cause: the motte-and-bailey tactic of making extraordinary claims, and then, when challenged, pretending to have made a smaller, noncontroversial claim; outrageous personal attacks; endless boasts and flaunting of one’s self as a paragon and one’s opponents as devils and fools, with almost no word spared on the actual dispute itself. The virtue-signaling, the screech-mobs, the empty victory parades the self-pity of the crybaby combined with the cruel vindictiveness of the bully: the Alt-Right is as intellectually bankrupt as the Alt-Left, or otherwise they would not be using their tactics.

Unfortunately Wright uses the same tactics against the alt-right that he ascribes to the left. Wright is virtue signaling by wrapping himself in ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ but castigating the alt-right as ‘racist’ and ‘un-American’, making himself look holier than thou in the process.